CHAPMAN PINCHER has been a leading journalist for thirty years, specializing in political disclosure, particularly in the fields of Intelligence, security and defence. Indeed, his own Intelligence has been the envy - and dismay - of a succession of Governments. This novel, his sixth, draws on that expertise and also on his considerable historical knowledge. In 1966 Chapman Pincher was nominated Reporter of the Decade. He is married with two grown-up children and lives in an ancient farmhouse in Surrey. His recreations, apart from writing, are studying Italian history, fishing, shooting and building stone walls.

Chapman Pincer

The Four Horses

JACKET NOTES: When terrorists perpetrate a daring hijack centred round the four bronze horses in Venice's Piazza San Marco, it proves to be Palestinian revenge for the humiliation at Entebbe. But although the resolution of the terrorists' actions provides a gripping climax to the book, this is much more than a conventional terrorist thriller. To illustrate how ordinary people and civilization have suffered, and still suffer, at the hands of extremists, Chapman Pincher has used the eventful history of the Four Horses to show how little the more dangerous aspects of human nature - fanaticism, greed, thirst for power and self-delusion - have changed over the centuries. The Four Horses is also an historical novel, and of an original kind.
The carefully-researched historical episodes are spread over 2,000 years, beginning with the creation of the horses for Alexander the Great. The horses are then removed to Rome, where they become the property of Nero and later of Constantine. He takes them to his new capital, Constantinople, where in 1204 the French and Venetian Crusaders sack the centre of Christendom. Enrico Dandolo, the great Doge, ships the horses to Venice, and there they remain until 1 797 when Napoleon removes them to Paris. They return finally to Venice after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. It is these outstanding leaders - Alexander the Great, Nero, Constantine, Dandolo, and Napoleon - who dominate the historical episodes of this unusual and compelling novel.
(© Michael Joseph Ltd.)